No one was injured when a condemned home in Pittsburgh’s Perry North neighborhood collapsed Friday, city officials said.
The city ordered the home at 45 Semicir St. to be evacuated a year ago.
Officials said the home wasn’t demolished because the hillside was insecure, causing unsafe conditions for contractors to take down the home. Demolishing the home also could have further eroded the hillside and endangered other structures on the street, officials said.
The now-collapsed home will be left there until it can be safely cleared away.
This week, the city’s Department of Mobility and Infrastructure announced that engineers completed geotechnical borings on Semicir Street to assess the condition of the hillside.
Plans for retaining the hillside will be completed in about three months, and remediation to stabilize it is expected to start two months after the designs are completed, officials said.
Record rainfall over the past 18 months has caused a surge of landslides in Pittsburgh and other Western Pennsylvania communities.
